Los sentidos de la experiencia escolar en estudiantes chilenos de grupo socioeconómico alto, medio y bajo

Abstract

Since the return to democracy in Chile, the general diagnosis established the existence of a "crisis of meaning" in the school. In order to show the senses elaborated by young Chileans from different socioeconomic groups about school, we conducted a qualitative biographical-narrative study based on interviews with 35 students from Low, Middle and High Socio-Economic Groups (GSE) who were in their last year of compulsory schooling. Findings show the existence of a plurality of school meanings, fundamentally grouped into those "extrinsic" (coming from the social narrative) and "intrinsic" (elaborated on the basis of the school experience itself). Both groups of meanings are distributed transversally among the student body. Even so, young people of the Low and Middle GSE tend to exhibit a greater emotional attachment to the meaning of the school experience, while those of the High GSE tend to perceive a more critical version of it. All in all, and without differences between GSE, the global direction of the semantification process around school is defined in the relational and relational dimension.